Practical tips on how to create, market and monetize your blog

Friday, April 18, 2014

Undoubtedly, creating a
blog is the most popular way to secure a platform in the web industry. You can
build a blog using various blogging softwares. Some of them are free such as
blogger, wordpress.com etc. But you will get the most benefit from the self
hosted wordpress blog. Those who don’t know the difference between a wordpress
and self hosted wordpress , here is a quick review.

Wordpress.com blogs are
free and are subdomains of the main software. You can create a blog whenever
you want but you can not have the full domain. The domain will look like this www.yourname.wordpress.com. You
can use limited services such as plugins , themes and you are not allowed to
monetize your blog.

In self hosted wordpress
you will get every benefit from the blogging platform. You can use your unique
domain (www.yourname.com), you can use
unlimited plugins, themes from wordpress.org and you can monetize your blog
too.Most of the bloggers choose
self hosted wordpress because of its wide range of services and ease of
control. I highly recommend you to do so.

So, let’s open a blog on
self hosted wordpress within 10 minutes!

The Things That We Need to
Open a Self-hosted Wordpress Blog are

1.A
Domain Name

2.You
Credit Card Number

3.And
Ten Minutes Only

Set Up Your Hosting Account

Before we proceed we need
to open our hosting account. Hosting means the place where you will install your blogging software. It’s the place to keep your
blog alive. There are many blog hosting services. But the most reliable service
provider is Bluehost.com. Most of the professional bloggers use bluehost and it has money back guarantee if
you are not satisfied with its service.It’s quite inexpensive compared to other
hosting services.

So, type www.bluehost.com. In the url bar. In the section "I need a
domain" , enter the domain name you want to set for your blog. Hit the next
button. Bluehost will check the availability of the domain. If it is available,
it will show “the domain is available”. If it is not, it will suggest other
domain or you can enter another.

Fill Up The Credit Card InformationThen fill up the credit
card information to pay for the hosting service. You have to pay for advance
obviously. There are different packages designed to different using period. The longer period of time you choose, the
cheapest service cost you will get. Select the package you want to deal with
and confirm that you have read bluehost’s terms of services. Then hit the next
button. Then it will take time to verify your billing information. After within
a second, you will be notified “congratulations”. Then choose a password for
your account. Be careful when you create password. Try to make password that is
really hard to guess and has a mix of numbers, letters and symbols. You can use
password generator to generate a rough and tough password and copy paste that
into the password section

Login To Your Hosting Account and Install Wordpress

Now it’s time to login to your account. Bluehost will
automatically insert your domain name, if it is not inserted, just type it and
provide the password you have just created. Click login. Then you will be at
the welcome screen. Don’t panic! There are
a lot of buttons, look for “Website Bulilders”. Click wordpress. It will take
some time. Then you will see Install wordpress screen and click “start”. Select
the domain name and hit “Check Domain”.

It will come up with an
error message (oops) but don’t panic
again. Just select the check box and again hit check domain. Then you will be
shown this message “You are almost there”. Hit the “install” button. It will
take sometime, you can sing a beautiful song on that moment for passing time!

When the process is
finished, bluehost will provide you with url of your blog, url of your login,
your username and password . Take a
screenshot of these information and try to keep a back up.

Login to The Dashboard of Your BlogThen click on the blog’s
url. A screen will come up with useramne and password. Enter the information
and login. This is the backend of your blog or dash board of your blog. You can
control everything of your blog from here. This is it. You have just opened a
self hosted wordpress blog within ten minutes. Now it’s time bookmark the page
for your convenience to login. And, lastly, create a first post for your blog.
Say “Hello Dear!”

You have the privilege to
use all the plugins and themes from wordpress.org for free. There are some
premium services which will cost you some money, but most of the plugins and
themes have high quality. It’s pretty easy to maintain your wordpress blog. You
don’t need to know any HTML or CSS coding for your blog. Just download services
from wordpress.org and install on your blog. That’s it. This is why wordpress
is so popular!